Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Just look at this squat little apple with its loose vertical stripes floating in a magenta-tinged blush. I dunno, maybe it's the size, or the way those tiny light lenticels accent the curvature of the fruit.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Williams is too understated to thrive in today's sugar-crunch market, but it was prized in the first half of the 19th Century.

One might also say that Williams (not to be confused with Williams' Pride) delivers some of the qualities promised, but rarely fulfilled, by Red Delicious, which it in some ways resembles.

My sample is on the small end of large with pronounced ribbing. The cheerful red blush over green is not so much streaky as spotted, like ripples spreading on a pond. In this background the small light lenticels are not obvious.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Last winter, my husband and I bought a house on 15 acres of land in the mountains of western Maine.

It had a little orchard, but since the previous tenants had fed the deer apples right in the middle of the orchard, our trees were eaten to nubs.

Nonetheless, we found about a dozen wild apple trees that had been planted by the deer maybe 30 years ago and had survived the browsing, the -20° winters, and the aggressive blocking of light by the neighboring pines.

When we asked ourselves what does our land want to grow, the wild trees told us on no uncertain terms: apples.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Steven Edholm, the polymathic paeleolith from Turkeysong ("a homestead in the beautiful coastal mountains of Northern California" as well as a blog) took the time to respond to yesterday's video about apple breeding from one of the big commercial breeders in New Zealand.

I noticed a while back how much breeding is the beginning of a line of thinking toward more and more sophisticated marketing. It seems like the trend is a little more skewed toward consumer satisfaction now.

I'm not convinced that they always know what consumers will want, given a broad choice [ya think?—Adam.], but apple quality in stores has certainly improved tremendously since I was a kid.

As many apples as it seems like they are releasing the entire industrial apple system will never be about diversity, or about really serving human needs or culture in a broader sense. It is, as the man said, a business.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The apple harvest may have been uneven, but we've had a bumper crop of apple books. They are a joy to read in the bleak off season.

The challenge in writing such a book is to stay engaging while stepping through many apple descriptions. To make the descriptions parallel enough to permit comparisons without falling into deadly similarity. To use the descriptions to say something as a whole as well as many things in particular.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Published last fall, Apples of New England is a rich guide to a topic close to my heart.

The small volume is somewhere between a coffee-table book, a primer, and a reference.

The author, Russell Steven Powell, is the former executive director of the New England Apple Association; he keeps his own apple blog. Documentation of each apple includes meticulous photos by Barr Lois Weeks, the current director.

In addition to a catalog of hundreds of varieties, Powell tells us some of the central stories about apples, with an emphasis on their New England roots in America.

However, "the small fraction of US adults who eat an apple a day do appear to use fewer prescription medications."

That's according to the paper "Association Between Apple Consumption and Physician Visits: Appealing the Conventional Wisdom That an Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away" (JAMA Intern Med doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.5466).

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Over objections from the apple industry, the U.S. government yesterday gave the green light to the first genetically engineered apples.

The gene-altered Arctic-brand apples are Granny Smith and Golden Delicious varieties that have been modified to resist browning when cut or bruised. Limited quantities could be brought to market as early as 2016.